When Waleska "Walle" Brito, rising senior and dual-sport athlete, walks around the Bard campus, she sees it differently than some others do.

When she sees buildings, she breaks them down in her mind to their component parts, the ways they can serve the community, a holistic basis for her love of architecture that dates back to her childhood love of Legos.

When she runs onto the soccer field as a creative attacking midfielder for Bard's women's soccer team, one of her two sports at Bard, she does so with gratitude for the opportunity she's nearly lost more than once.

And when she hears that familiar ring from FaceTime and logs onto her family's nightly remote gathering, she never forgets that there is no guarantee of what's ahead in life, that these moments she can share with her twin sister, Ines, her naval-officer father, Boris, stationed back in her native Ecuador, and her mother, Angelina, who lives in Virginia, are ones to treasure. Angelina was diagnosed with breast cancer in the winter of 2022, creating challenges from an emotional, financial and logistical front for Brito's life at Bard and for the entire family.

Both Walle and Ines offered to take the semester off and help, both with mom's chemo treatments and to alleviate the financial burden of attending college (Ines is a student at Virginia Commonwealth). But Angelina wouldn't have it.
So armed with the confidence of her parents, Walle has taken to her life at Bard determined to savor every single moment, the wisdom of someone who has lived many more years than Brito has. It's evident in the gusto with which she took on the opportunity to play for Coach Kate Hofstede and the women's soccer team, the way she incorporates her empathetic view of the world into her architectural studies, the way she even practices by herself, kicking a ball against the wall with determination, never taking a drill off.

Brito says it all happens for a simple reason: though she came from Ecuador, her mom lives in Virginia, her other half attends school hours away, Bard is home.

"So I don't I don't think the whole idea of having a home is like a settled place," Brito said. "I can find home-like people and I myself consider home [to be] people. So for me, my Bard family has become like a settled place — and for the first time I'm thinking about home as a settled place. And it definitely is going to hurt when I leave."

Her journey to Bard soccer glory began as a three-year-old girl, watching her older cousins play soccer in their backyard in Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador. She idolized them, and so naturally, if they played, she wanted to play. By the time she was 16, she loved the game, playing it with a creative flair that jumped off the screen the first time Hofstede saw her on film. She and her mom had come to Farmville, Virginia, where Angelina had been hired to teach, and Brito got the chance to play organized soccer — with proper equipment for the first time, Brito recalled — at a level that meant doing it collegiately in the United States would be possible. 

"The one thing that she brought that not many players bring in is creativity and having a passion for sport that goes well beyond just X's and O's," Hofstede said. "It's not just going to score the goals. It's actually making the game enjoyable to watch. And she brought that and others actually had to help understand it because they weren't familiar with her craft."

Bard offered her the chance to do that, sure, but also to study architecture. She'd become enamored with the houses she'd see in Virginia, colonial architecture so different from the urban landscape of Guayaquil's 2.7 million people, and knew she wanted to learn how to build as well.

Still: she understood even sending her to Bard was a financial stretch for her family, made worse by the coronavirus pandemic which cost Angelina her job. 

"I was already enrolled in college and my sister as well," Brito remembered. "So having to pursue that dream that I was so excited for and then having the possibility of it not becoming real, definitely was heartbreaking for me. And so my parents gave me the opportunity to try out for one semester at least. And so I came with a mindset that I'm only going to be here one semester. So that's why I fully came in with a mindset of 'I've got to take advantage of every single second that I'm on this turf.'"

Her buy-in was fully evident to everyone — to teammates who helped her acclimate, Walle apologizing for her English as she worked to better it, to Hofstede in the way she'd be willing to help the team in any way possible — even offering to bring water to the team if Coach wanted her to take that on.

Brito remembers not knowing if she'd be able to return for her sophomore year, not until her father, at the end of a visit to the United States when she opened her heart and poured out how much she loved Bard to him, opened his laptop with her and said it was time to re-enroll.

"Something that I learned in my younger years was [the need to find] individuals that wanted to be somewhere and they showed a commitment to it — they showed a passion for it, right?" Hofstede said. I mean, if I was able to bring in the best players in the world to this program, but there wasn't really a drive for them to continue to get better, I would probably be less inclined to invest in them, despite the fact that they have a lot to offer, you know, with their game. Passion to me is something that really drives that level of growth."

It's done that for both Brito, a consistent presence throughout her three years at Bard, with 995 minutes logged in her junior year alone, and the Bard team, which has improved its record in each of the three years Brito has played for the Raptors. Nor was she satisfied with soccer alone. When the women's basketball team needed more players, she jumped at the chance to help, channeling memories of the basketball hoop her father had put up in their home back in Ecuador and participating fully, as she does in all things, eventually scoring a basket against SUNY-Canton in her sophomore year and returning to play for her junior year. She never complained about playing time. She was just grateful for the chance. She's grateful, too, for the social conscience she's been able to develop on campus, giving direction to both her senior project and career plans to follow.

"Back home, study [of architecture] would be more technical," Brito said. "In grad school, it would be more technical learning, like how many wood frame models you can make. But Bard has expanded my thinking and my perspective for the world itself." Now Brito hopes her architectural mind can be part of finding solutions to rebuilding war-torn cities, like Gaza, to not just "build buildings, but to help people".

As for the nightly FaceTimes, they are happier occasions these days. Thankfully, Angelina had successful surgery for her breast cancer and, after undergoing chemo, is doing well. Walle knows this could be a temporary reprieve, and as the days grow warmer in Annandale-on-Hudson, she doesn't let herself forget to celebrate each one of them. And she's changed so much already through her perseverance — she's left a legacy, an example Hofstede uses with her team now and will even after Brito graduates and commences changing the world, one building at a time.

"There's value in people that they may not have those opportunities that a majority of these recruits have where they're playing high-level soccer and their pay-to-play and traveling all around the country and the world," Hofstede mused. "And then you just have this one individual who comes in with a passion and a sense for living and embracing it. I'll take that kid any day over just talent. So I think that people just need to know that you're capable and you're able as long as you believe it and you are grateful for it."